Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

By Pegeen Reichert Powell

Retention and Resistance combines personal student narratives with a critical analysis of the current approach to retention in colleges and universities, and explores how retention can inform a revision of goals for first-year writing teachers.

Retention is a vital issue for institutions, but as these students’ stories show, leaving college is often the result of complex and idiosyncratic individual situations that make institutional efforts difficult and ultimately ineffective. An adjustment of institutional and pedagogical objectives is needed to refocus on educating as many students as possible, including those who might leave before graduation.

Much of the pedagogy, curricula, and methodologies of composition studies assume students are preparing for further academic study. Retention and Resistance argues for a new kairotic pedagogy that moves toward an emphasis on the present classroom experience and takes students’ varied experiences into account. Infusing the discourse of retention with three individual student voices, Powell explores the obligation of faculty to participate in designing an institution that educates all students, no matter where they are in their educational journey or how far that journey will go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780874219319

Book preview

Resistance

Introduction

---

Paying Attention to the Discourse of Retention in Higher Education

It is from the idea that we can and should succeed that failure is born.

—David Payne 1989, Coping with Failure: The Therapeutic Uses of Rhetoric

[College] was a major step, and it was something that I needed because God knows, if I didn’t have a taste of what college was like, I might still be on the streets because I wouldn’t know where to go back to now.

—Helen¹

In the fall of 2008, my two sections of first-year writing were positively electric with the excitement of the campaign and ultimately the election of Barack Obama. I had designed the course to tap into that fall’s election, and I enjoyed teaching these two particularly motivated, bright, cohesive groups of students. Two years later, in fall 2010, only eight of the twenty-four students from those classes were still enrolled at my institution. Our institution-wide retention rate for their cohort two years later was 52 percent, and our current graduation rate is 41 percent; neither are rates my college is satisfied with, but they are better than the distressing 33 percent retention rate among the students in my two classes (Columbia College Chicago 2013).

In his first address to the joint session of congress in Feb­ruary 2009, President Obama identified college retention as one of the major initiatives of his administration: In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity—it is a pre-requisite. . . . That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world (Obama 2009a). And a few months later, he announced the American Graduation Initiative, with the goal that the United States will regain its place as the country with the highest proportion of college graduates (Obama 2009c).

Even before President Obama announced his education agenda, the powerful College Board established the Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education, which created the College Completion Agenda. Among other efforts, the Agenda identifies criteria and makes recommendations for improving state policy and has set a goal that 55 percent of all twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds will hold an associate degree or higher by 2025 (College Board 2011). Around the same time, the equally powerful Gates Foundation identified college graduation as one of its top concerns, launching Complete College America, the central feature of which is the Alliance of States (currently there are twenty-nine) involving states that have committed to identifying and implementing state-level policies that will improve the graduation rate nationally and collecting data to measure progress (Complete College America 2011).

But the discourse of retention is not just circulating among national-level policy wonks. This discourse is circulating within higher education as well. Increasingly, graduation rates have become a key factor in students’ decisions about enrolling in a college or university. These rates have been available for a while, ever since it became mandatory that institutions post them as part of the Student Right-to-Know Act, but they have become easier for students and their families, as responsible consumers, to find; for example, on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, students can compare colleges or universities across several variables, including graduation and loan default rates (IPEDS 2013). More recently, in winter 2013, the White House launched the College Scorecard, which enables students’ families to search in a variety of ways for data on specific institutions, and which features most prominently the institution’s costs and graduation rates (White House 2013). This scrutiny on the part of students and their families is, understandably, compelling colleges and universities to pay more attention than ever before to retention.

The term retention in higher education refers to the ability of an institution to keep students enrolled until graduation, and the federal government maintains standards and definitions for calculating and reporting institutions’ ability to do so. (The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System is a reliable source for such standards and definitions; see IPEDS 2013.) However, in current discourse, retention also signifies more generally the problem of students leaving college before graduation, the tremendous efforts of colleges and universities to prevent this from happening, the rapidly growing body of research and scholarship that surrounds the problem, and, increasingly, the for-profit consulting enterprises that sell solutions. This discourse also entails significant questions about whether higher education is a right or a privilege, about an institution’s or an instructor’s responsibility to individual students, about what and how we teach when we know students may leave. It is this larger, admittedly messier, discourse, and especially the ways this discourse intersects with my work as a writing teacher, that I am concerned with in this book.

It is easy to believe we’re hearing more about retention recently because of the economy. For example, President Obama set his agenda during an international financial collapse, and the merit of promoting more college graduates at that time seemed obvious. More locally, likewise, we might blame the economy for the drone of this buzzword at our own institutions. A dominant feature of the discourse of retention is the idea that college is an investment (my own college president used this very term at a recent graduation), but the difficulty of securing loans and grants makes families much more cautious about where and how they invest their money. At my institution, we hear that, in this current economy, families do not see a private arts and media college education as a wise investment. Therefore, we need to work harder to keep the students we already have: retention.

This is a Why-Johnny-Can’t-Read moment, when popular and political discourses intersect with our work in the classroom in significant, material ways. And for those of us whose careers are devoted to college-level teaching, this kind of pervasive attention to the importance of helping students graduate from college is very seductive. As instructors, the discourse of retention appeals to our benevolence and our self-interest at the same time. Almost every teacher I know has a story about that one bright, engaged student, and most of us have several stories, several students who just disappeared. Sometimes they leave in the middle of the semester, no good-byes, no explanations. Sometimes they come to us after handing in the final project, and with head down, in deflated tones, admit they won’t be back next semester. Money problems, they say, or the family situation, y’know. Sometimes we might have predicted they would leave, but, for me at least, expecting this outcome makes it worse: I wanted this one to beat the odds. At the same time, the discourse of retention also appeals to our self-interest: at my institution, it is declining enrollment and retention rates that explain why full-time faculty don’t get the cost-of-living raise this year and why part-time faculty lost sections at the last minute. We come to understand that butts in seats mean money in pockets. It’s a seductive discourse.

I admit: I was seduced. This project is motivated by my experiences in the writing class, classes like those I taught in fall 2008, when the energy of the semester inevitably yielded to the disappointment as one student, then another, then yet others, left. As a faculty member concerned about the financial health of my place of employment, I pay attention to our graduation rates and efforts to improve them. However, as a teacher of first-year writing and a composition studies scholar, I undertook this project primarily because I became frustrated as I watched my students leave. I found myself reading retention scholarship, assuming there must be something I could learn that would increase their chances of sticking around. I received a grant from my institution’s Office of Multicultural Affairs to establish a one-year program to work closely with a group of students whose profile suggested they were at risk for dropping out. I figured I’d learn from students what the real issues were. I read more retention scholarship (chapter 1 provides a brief survey of retention scholarship).

This book is the result of my immersion in the discourse of retention. Or more accurately, it is the result of my critical engagement with this discourse as it circulates at my institution and elsewhere and my increasing skepticism about the utility of the growing body of scholarship on retention, or at least its applicability to my work as a writing teacher. Retention tends to function metonymically in higher education today. Metonymy is one of Kenneth Burke’s four master tropes; Burke explains, The basic ‘strategy’ in metonymy is this: to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible (Burke 1969, 506). Metonymy, according to Burke, is fundamentally, a strategy of reduction (507). In this case, retention functions metonymically by reducing a variety of intangibles—student success and failure, the value of higher education in general, the purpose of courses like first-year writing in particular, and so on—to a set of tangible numbers, or even to something more corporeal: butts in seats. The difference between metaphor and metonymy is that while metaphor works by putting two different cognitive frames together, metonymy works with both the target and the vehicle operating in the same cognitive frame (Feyaerts and Brone 2005, 14). Robert Frost famously argues that all metaphor breaks down somewhere; despite the important difference between metaphor and metonymy, I would extend Frost’s assertion to metonymy (Frost 2007, 107). At some point, we simply can’t reduce student success and failure, the value of higher education, or the purpose of our courses, to a set of numbers. Retention, as a figure of speech, breaks down. My project here can be understood as seeking out those breaking points, exploiting them, and not only critiquing the potential damage this figure can wreak but also reversing the reduction and identifying some of the real issues hidden therein.

Throughout the book, I explore the discourse of retention and present a twofold argument. On one hand, I argue that faculty must be mindful as this discourse circulates in our institutions. We must be attentive to the material and conceptual implications of this discourse as it affects our curricula and job descriptions and also as it circumscribes our understanding of the student and the purpose of higher education. On the other hand, however, I argue that the discourse of retention holds heuristic value for everyone in higher education: when students drop out, we confront our own limits as educators. How can we achieve our pedagogical goals or institutional missions when students leave? How might we reframe the discourse of retention so it is as much about educating the students in front of us as it is about trying to keep students here?

A note about vocabulary: retention refers to the rate at which institutions keep students until they graduate; persistence refers to an individual student’s decision and effort to graduate, regardless of the institution. Persistence rates, therefore, track a student who transfers to various institutions. I will refer to retention throughout the book unless I intend to make this distinction because retention is the common label for the complex of problems I am discussing. However, I believe our goal should not be to improve retention rates but to help each student who is willing and able to persist (see Hagedorn 2005, 92, for a discussion of these terms).

Paying

Reviews for Retention and Resistance

[desirichter · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Retention and Resistance, Pegeen Reichert Powell examines two aspects of higher education that are near to my heart: first year writing instruction and student retention. The entire work is bent on re-framing writing pedagogy not in terms of the current, "How can we get student to stay in school?" to "How can we best serve the students in our writing classes NOW, regardless of whether or not they will inevitably leave our institutions?" Reichert has clearly wrestled with the retention literature, and it seems clear to her that whether or not students stay or go is largely due to factors beyond the control of universities. Reichtert also illuminates that retention rhetoric serves institutions of higher education which seem to be inextricably wed to business models of education (which view students as customers to be won and whose loss of business can leave colleges in dire financial straits). While Reichert may be right (and certainly is to some extent), I'm not convinced that the retention problem is as clearly answered as she would like readers to believe. While Reichert makes a compelling case to look "beyond retention," recognizing that current measures of retention do little to take into account for students whose pathway in higher ed is convoluted and even challenging the notion that retention is always bad, her analysis at times pulls up short, and fails to explore what potentially viable retention strategies. What I mean is this: Reichert deconstructs Tinto's seminal and widely implemented retention theory on the grounds that he places the fault of attrition on students' failure to assimilate into the social and intellectual communities of their schools. She claims that Tinto's model, and its descendants, "attempt to align the individual more thoroughly with the preexisting intellectual and social values of the institution. Nothing is done to change the nature of the institution itself, and this, I argue is where the discourse of retention fails most thoroughly" (pg. 27). I couldn't agree more with Reichert's assessment of this fundamental error in Tinto's theory. Colleges mobilize numerous resources in attempts help students assimilate; yet these attempts have made little to no difference in retention rates. I fail to understand why, when Reichert has time and again in her book unflinchingly called out her own institution by name, she never offers even an inkling of the types of institutional changes she would advocate for. Perhaps she believes the patterns are too entrenched to allow for the "radical change" (pg. 28) she (and I) believe are necessary. I, for one, would welcome her specific thoughts on the subject. I'd love to ask her to flesh out these sweeping institutional changes she tiptoes around but never really states. I want specifics. She offers none in this work. If Reichert offers me no particulars about large-scale institutional change, she does share thoughts-a-plenty about how writing teachers should intersect with students who may or may not follow the traditional linear path to degree completion, or who may choose not to complete college at all. Reichert's vision for writing classes is grounded in the rhetorical concept of kairos. In contrast to assuming that learning happens chronologically (that is, as a linear progression of skills learned in sequence) a kairotic approach to writing pedagogy utilizes the particulars of the time and place, the "forces" at play within the students' own particular context to stimulate learning. In the writing classroom starting from kairos, "we begin with writing and reading tasks that are important here and now in the lives of engaged students, workers, citizens" (importantly, NOT a set of standards, or discrete skills that student may or may not need at a later time). Importantly, Reichert notes, "This approach requires a a shift in how we frame our course goals and assignments: It is a matter of understanding our goals and assignments in terms of teaching students to seize the opportunities available to them in the context they are currently in and making sure that context--subject matter and intellectual tasks--fosters their immediate engagement" (pg. 118). I infer from the above quote that Reichert, not knowing where her students will be after they leave her class, is more concerned with helping her students act as writers with meaningful purposes and audiences WHILE THEY ARE WITH HER, than in attempting to foster a set of skills which the research has shown likely doesn't transfer "across the curriculum" or into new writing contexts anyway. Because the educational pathway is often not a linear one, Reichert, advocates critical engagement in the present, so that whether or not students who leave, return to college, writing will have served them in meaningful ways. I'm still digesting this dense book, filled with what one colleague terms "POMO" (Postmodern) discourse, but I am very much intrigued by how incorporating kairos into my class would actually play out. To be fair, Reichtert is not advocating the abandonment of chronos in writing pedagogy, merely drawing attention to how kairos can serve students. Because I'm young(ish) and new to the world of teaching in higher ed, I'm not convinced that the retention discussion needs to be put to rest in the way that I infer Reichert would like it to be. In a problem that is so multifaceted, I still believe that institutional changes which make the college environ less hostile to diverse learners could make a difference. I say this while completely agreeing with Reichert that many of the factors influencing retention (finances, familial instability) are completely out of my control. Unlike her though, I still feel the need to not only engage my students where they are at, but to see what sort of institutional give I can foster in order to nudge students to stay. That being said, Reichert's work encouraged me to re-envision the retention conversation, and I have no doubt I will return to it again and again as I undertake my own investigation of the retention issue through implementing a (hopefully) culturally-relevant, workshop approach that I believe Reichert herself might approve of. :)